Interoperability and Data Viability

With the advent of the digital age, there has been increasing concern over the preservation of digitally-encoded information.  Documents created ten years ago cannot be read by today's programs, and emerging forms of entertainment—games, digital music, etc.—created ten years ago are often unreadable today.  The historically tight coupling between content and environment has led to a push for open standards which would enable digital information to outlast its original environment.  Readers may recall an e-mail campaign a few years ago encouraging anyone who received an e-mail with a closed-standard document attached to reject the e-mail.

Microsoft held a press conference today in which they announced changes to their technology and business practices relating to interoperability and data viability.  The technical specifications for all Microsoft Office documents are now openly available, and many of the programming interfaces have been exposed to permit interoperability with other programs.  As the announcement was made over 30,000 pages of documentation were posted online, documentation previously available only to corporations with a trade secret agreement. This new openness obviously comes at some expense to Microsoft, as trade secrets are necessarily being exposed. However, it's the right thing to do.  Office users create documents with the intent of recording information, not with the intent of creating a Microsoft document.  Digital information is only valuable to the extent that it can be accessed, and inasmuch as Microsoft follows through on today's commitments, they've make a large step in reaching that goal.